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The Dirty Secret About FreeEats (and How to Abuse It)

Update 5/1/2017 – As of July 28, 2016, FreeEats.com has suspended their referral program. HOWEVER, if you’re still looking for a passive income option that’s even EASIER (and still free), check out Slidejoy!

What is FreeEats?

FreeEats.com is a survey company that pays through PayPal and provides nearly instant (next day at worst) payouts both for text messages that they send to your phone and for referrals. For this post, we’re not going to be concerned about the text messages. We only want to focus on referring new users. The program currently pays $1 for each person that you refer to them through your affiliate link.

Is the FreeEats program a scam?

No. FreeEats is not a scam. Since my last post, I’ve made a fair bit of money from them. No, it’s not a huge amount, but it’s enough to make it worth my while to blog about it.

The dirty little secret about FreeEats that you MUST know about is…

This is an excerpt from an email conversation I had with the help desk at Free Eats. I had emailed them to find out if they had any tracking methods for getting accurate stats on my referrals.

We are working on a customer portal to allow users to view their account stats/information however this isn’t ready just yet. For now the fastest and easiest way to see how many referrals you have is to track how many dollar payments we’ve made to your account minus any ad/survey payments we have made to you. Also please keep in mind that we cap referral payments at 50 so if you have received 50 referral payments you won’t receive any additional payments for referrals. Thanks.

FreeEats

What? They are capping referral payments? And there’s no real way to track your stats? Come on…there’s got to be a better way to do this!

Getting around the FreeEats referral cap…

First, let me give you this disclaimer: this will work if you have some discipline. The good news is that you’re not going to need a lot of it.

If you feel pretty good about your methods of referring, and you’ve been making money but are nearing (or have hit) the cap, then this method will allow you to keep making money from FreeEats. It’s a little sneaky, but it’s also well within the FreeEats rules.

Before you get started, you’re going to need an account with FreeEats. Don’t worry. It’s free and very easy to opt out if you decide it’s not for you. If you want to set up an account, you can use this FreeEats referral link.

After you’ve got your referral address (which will be sent to you via text message), you need to make sure that you can remember the link. Write it down or put it in a spreadsheet or whatever you do. Personally, I use the Ninja Affiliate plugin. It lets me customize referral links so that they are easy to remember AND I get a basic level of click tracking (since FreeEats doesn’t provide tracking at this time).

Once you have your referral link, start pushing that traffic! I prefer social media and word of mouth, but anything works as long as you make conversions.

Now, here’s where it gets annoying: you can still only refer 50 people. BUT…you can also have multiple FreeEats accounts as long as you own the phone that you’re using to sign up with! Here’s a bit from their FAQ:

11. May I register more than one mobile phone number?

Yes. It just needs to be a valid mobile phone number that you own.

The last part is the most important part. You will need more than one phone.

I know, it’s a hassle to switch phones (I know, I just upgraded from the iPhone 4 to the Droid Turbo). But what if you didn’t have to do that? This is the part where you need some discipline and patience.

You are probably going to want to do this before you hit the 50 referral cap.

By this point, you should have a bit of money in your PayPal account from referring people. Take part of that money and use it to purchase a cheap throwaway phone. I prefer something like this Tracfone Samsung s150G that can be picked up for about $15 bucks.

Yes, that will take $15 bucks out of your $50, but it gives you the chance to keep going once you hit the cap on referrals. So basically, the earning potential is pretty awesome. And another benefit to doing something like this is that you might be able to write it off as a business expense (you will want to check with your tax pro about this).

$50 – $15 = $35

$35 + $50 = $85

Keep repeating this process as long as you can and you’ll make a pretty fair amount of money. Yes, there’s a little hassle involved, but the truth is that this is really, really easy money and a great way to turn lunch money into a car payment (if you keep pushing this).